SIU alum gives advice for avoiding physician burnout

Monday

An Atlanta surgeon who gave advice Monday to local medical students on ways of avoiding burnout once they become doctors said patients have reason to care about this growing problem.

“If your car mechanic has a bad day when they're changing your oil, you could have issues with your car, but what if your surgeon is having a bad day the day you're having breast-cancer surgery?" asked Dr. Starla Fitch, a 1987 graduate of Springfield’s Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

Doctors who exhibit classic signs of burnout — loss of enthusiasm, feelings of cynicism and a low sense of personal accomplishment — are more likely to make mistakes and under-perform overall, she told The State Journal-Register.

Fitch, a Texas native, ophthalmologist and sociologist, works part time as a certified life coach and wrote the 2014 book, “Remedy for Burnout: 7 Prescriptions Doctors Use to Find Meaning in Medicine.”

Invited by SIU dean Dr. J. Kevin Dorsey, Fitch traveled from Georgia to speak Monday to about 70 fourth-year medical students who will graduate medical school, become doctors this spring and begin multi-year residencies at hospitals and clinics this summer.

She encouraged the students to keep in contact with each other and nurture family and personal relationships to avoid burnout.

One study indicated being "socially connected" was "more important to your health than cigarette smoking, obesity and high blood pressure," she said. "And they don't mean, like, have 5,000 Facebook friends. We're talking about small acts of service or kindness that can help create that sense of purpose and connection."

Developing hobbies and other interests outside medicine can help doctors, too, she said.

“We’re all glued to our smartphones and our computers and our tablets,” she said. "And that's great that technology is there, but so many people are having such disconnect with their families and their colleagues at work."

Fitch, who specializes in eyelid surgery and problems that affect the tear ducts and eye socket, said members of the general public may have little patience for doctors’ personal struggles.

After all, doctors don’t face the financial pressures that most of their patients struggle through, she said.

“It’s not appropriate for doctors to say, ‘poor, pitiful me,’” she said.

But patients could help themselves in the long run by showing more concern for their doctors, she said.

When doctors walk into an exam room, they often greet patients by inquiring about their overall well-being or their families.

“It’s very rare when patients say back, ‘Fine, how are you?’” Fitch said.

When patients express interest in their doctors’ lives, a relationship that benefits both can grow, she said.

“The best situation is when the doctor and patient are working together as a team,” she said.

Fitch’s insights into the psyche of doctors and the thoughts of patients went viral through her blog post, “The Secret Lives of Doctors,” on the Huffington Post website last July. The post received more than 99,000 likes and thousands of tweets on Twitter.

In one section of the post, she writes: “Doctors are never talking to their broker, their tailor, their jeweler, or their Porsche dealer when they are late. They may be talking to the doctor taking care of their grandmother in a hospital in another state, or their uncle trying to explain their aunt’s bad prognosis that they’ve just heard, or their spouse explaining why they can’t be at the recital/ballgame/Scout meeting tonight.”

Fitch, who is married to an oral surgeon and has no children, said she overcame her own burnout earlier in her career. But many doctors don’t reach out.

“We are perfectionists,” Fitch said, noting that 300 to 400 doctors commit suicide each year in the United States. “We don’t want to think we can’t do it all ourselves. There's such a stigma attached to that.”

Being a doctor often comes with long hours, the stress of making life-or-death decisions and unrealistic expectations from patients, she said.

Younger doctors actually report higher rates of burnout than more-seasoned doctors, she said. That may be because older doctors experienced more control over their professional lives earlier in their career, before the advent of interventions by insurance companies, managed-care entities and governments into the practice of medicine, she said.

Young doctors often graduate medical school with more than $250,000 in educational debts and must see 40 to 60 patients a day to pay their debts and earn a respectable income, she added.

SIU’s senior medical students appreciated Fitch’s emphasis on the importance of bucking tradition and not ignoring the emotional and psychological challenges modern doctors face, said Dr. Christine Todd, chairwoman of SIU’s medical humanities department.

“There’s a physician culture of ‘just suck it up and do it,’” she said. “People really don’t like to hear physicians complain. She’s creating a space where it’s OK for physicians to talk about it.”

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